Unity arrives on Xbox One, free for ID@Xbox devs

Unity has announced the release of the public preview of Unity 4.3 for Xbox One. What's more, it is available for free for all registered ID@Xbox developers with development kits.

"The list of Xbox One features and API’s is extensive. While we have wrapped some core features directly inside of Unity, the vast majority of the platform specific functionality we are distributing with full source as an independent package of plugins," Unity said in a statement today. "We believe this is the best way to empower you to extend these systems to fit your games’ needs while providing a core out of the box experience that will work for many games.

"Writing native plugins and marshalling data from managed to native is not always straightforward and Xbox One has a high degree of asynchronous APIs. The native Plugins make it easier for developers to integrate the Microsoft APIs with Unity, providing constructs like the EventQueue to help with calling into Unity systems from asynchronous callbacks."

The current release of Unity for Xbox One is based off Unity 4.3, though the company says there's still "a lot to do." In the near term, they will continue "wrapping Xbox One features and maturing the engine." Looking ahead, Xbox One will not support Unity 4.5, but will instead jump directly to Unity 5.0 which will eventually be the recommended version for all Xbox One development.

In the meantime, Xbox One gamers can expect the first round of Unity-based titles to arrive shortly. The list includes Ori and the Blind Forest, Cuphead and Roundabout.